The Araby

James Joyce's Araby is a short story from one of his best known works, Dubliners, and is classified as "fictionalized autobiography" because of its clear influences from Joyce's own early life in Ireland. The story follows an unnamed Irish boy, presumably based on Joyce himself, who is infatuated with the sister of his friend, Mangan. As a way to prove his love to her, the boy dedicates himself to going to a bazaar called the “Araby” to find her a gift. Told from the somewhat limited perspective this young, innocent boy, this figurative journey leads up to an important but disillusioning coming-of-age moment. Through the boy's imaginative figuration of himself as a knight on a quest on behalf of his courtly lady, Joyce not only shows the boy's immense idealization of his situation, but in the process also shows how unrealistic and absurd this romanticism is, all with the ultimate purpose of showing the boy's final realizations at the end of his journey as he finally recognizes the dullness and materialism of the "brown" life under the constructs of the false images that hide them.

By having the narrator think of himself as a glorious knight who goes on a journey to win the heart of the courtly lady that is high above him, Joyce demonstrates the special idealism of the main character; an idealism that seems to separate the boy from the dull, “brown” society that surrounds him. For the use of his figuration, Joyce (or perhaps the boy himself) seem to rely on the classic courtly love scenario of medieval poetry in which the narrator, as a knight, falls in love with a pure and beautiful yet unattainable lady of the court. It is then through the process of the knight's struggle of love that the lowly knight is ultimately also raised u...

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...cality in the form of money where true idealizations are nonexistent.

In essence, James Joyce's short story shows the journey of a young Irish boy from innocence and naiveté toward a comprehension of the truth about the darkness and dullness of life. By utilizing the classic medieval structure of a knight being raised up by a courtly lady and by changing the customary ending, Joyce was able to make the fall of the boy more apparent and emphasized, thus contributing to Joyce's overall message about the deceit of idealistic images in real life. Further, by omitting the names of Mangan's sister and even the main character himself, Joyce seems to point to the universality of this concept. In other words, every person undergoes a similar transition from childish idealism to practicality in the real world, which is what makes Joyce’s story so all-inclusive and endearing.